'Policy review' junks the
The politics of Socialist Organiser have changed considerably over the last few years, and the issue of
15 September contains the latest major leap. Socialist Organiser's leading supporters appear to have reached a hiatus over their previous characterisation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state. A recent editorial, Reassessing the Eastern Bloc', promises a full discussion on the issue - but adds ominously 'some of us think that some term like "bureaucratic collectivism" is the best approximation. Others would prefer "state capitalism"' It appears that 'old orthodoxy' has been found guilty before trial - leaving only sentence to be pronounced.
A central feature of trotskyism since the 1930s has been its analysis of the Soviet Union as a 'degenerated workers' state'. This means that while the property relations arising from the socialist revolution of 1917 remain (i.e. a nationalised and planned economy and a state monopoly of foreign trade), under Stalin the bureaucracy usurped power and smashed workers' democracy.
As a consequence, Trotsky and his followers called for political revolution in the USSR against the bureaucracy, while at the same time defending the gains of the October revolution against imperialism, independently of and against the bureaucracy.
After the second world war two main views existed on the social transformation of eastern Europe after the Soviet victory over German imperialism. The majority view adopted by the third Congress of the Fourth International in 1951 was that the USSR remained degenerated workers' state and the'Peoples Democracies' in eastern Europe were deformed workers' states - i.e. states with the same property relations as the USSR, but which had had a stalinist state structure imposed upon them rather than arising from the degeneration of a working-class revolution as in the USSR.
Adherents of the view that the class nature of these states was either a capitalist class atop a statified economy oranew kind of ruling class left the Fourth International, and most took a neutralist position during the Korean war. Some subsequently attempted to retain a revolutionary perspective despite their views on the USSR; others drifted to the right or even
There are two main aspects to these debates - first, as to the class nature of these states and
F EATURES old trotskyism how they came about, and secondly (but closely connected) what the programme and tasks of revolutionaries should be in relation to them. While nearly all those who claim to be trotskyists have agreed on their characterisation of the class nature of these states, they have had very different views on the nature of their transformation and the tasks which follow from it.
On some occasions sections of the movement have failed to defend workers' rights, or even fellow trotskyists, in their eagerness to support stalinist or nationalist-led revolutions. but SO extrapolate backwards from these important differences to argue that the characterisation of the states themselves is wrong
Such theoretical methods led to SO's lurch to the right, causing it to rupture in 1984. Those of us who opposed this degeneration were involved in the establishment of Socialist Vienpoint, and later Socialist Outlook, and the fortnightly Labour Briefing.
We wrote at the time, "with the cancer of sectarianism established, further decline and degeneration must be the immediate prospect'. The SO editorial board after the split had a freer hand to follow its own path.
The first victim of their 'policy review' was to deny the progressive nature of many struggles against imperialism and practically abandon the principle of national self-determination. SO must be the only trotskyist group in the world to have addressed an open letter to a revolutionary nationalist leader (Gerry Adams) calling on an armed resistance movement (the IRA) to lay down its guns. SO argues rightly that the world has changed since 1916; but far from developing upon Lenin, they throw the movement back to Kautskyism. They claim in this article that post-war capitalism has been capable of a generalised expansion of productive forces and that the workers' movement is organically developing with it.
From this they draw the conclusion that to the extent that bourgeois democracies
(or even capitalist police-states such as
South Korea) allow more openings for working class organisatión and democratic rights they are more
"progressive' than the workers' states, which are historical anachronisms. Logically this could infer that we are no longer in a period when successful working class revolution is possible, if we ever were This is the evolutionary socialism of the Second International complete with its Eurocentric arrogance.
The final question that needs to be asked is: why the change of line? SO gives no reason why the change should be necessary at this time. In fact, ' orthodox trotskyist' theory deals with the current battles within the Soviet bureaucracy better than any'new class' theory can.
The reality is that the change has more to do with the organisational dynamics of SO than with the dynamic of world history. The antisovietism which has increasingly crept into SO's material is finally being consummated with a change of line on the workers' states which sets the seal on the break with trotskyism implicit in their polities for several years.
Groupings which develop a line and perspective to satisfy their own organisational requirements rather than the class struggle are called sects.
Socialist Organiser is at this time a rightward-moving one. Its supporters should understand the significamce of this debate and be warned about the method and political direction in which they are being led.
Mick Woods Pete Firmin